The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (6 page)

Mac didn’t say anything more for forty-five minutes; he just set back in awe while The Avenger drove like an inspired race-track expert. And at the end of that forty-five minutes both saw the same thing at the same time.

They were in the open country, though so many small towns and scattered dwellings were around that it looked almost suburban. Lights were everywhere, for it was about nine-thirty at night, by now.

Against a cluster of lights ahead and to their right, they saw the outline of this black thing. It was in a lane or small side road, just standing there.

“What in the worrrld,” began Mac. “The thing’s a car!” he added suddenly.

But it wasn’t like any car he had ever seen before.

Of course, they could see just the black silhouette against the distant lights, but that gave a fair view: a car so streamlined that it was almost a perfect teardrop shape. It was a foot lower than most cars, and with glints advertising the fact that there was far more glass in it than in most automobiles.

Mac and Benson were near the entrance of the lane, and then the car moved. How it moved! Without one sound, it seemed fairly to leap toward the highway—and toward the car Mac and The Avenger were riding in! It was like a lurking monster that lets its prey get within striking distance and then pounces.

“Look out!” yelled Mac. The yell was instinctive, for he knew very well that The Avenger would see any given thing even faster than he would.

Dick Benson had seen, all right. He twirled the wheel of his ponderous machine as if it had been a tiddly-wink in his steely hands. But no turn could avoid that charge!

The strange-looking car had picked up an incredible speed in the eighty yards or so it had traveled. It must have been going fifty when it crashed The Avenger’s car.

There was a wham that split the night, and Benson’s tanklike machine rocked far over, tipped back and screamed to a stop, hopelessly disabled. Any other car on earth that had hit the specially built machine hard enough to knock it out of the running would have been a smashed ruin, itself. But not this teardrop thing. It backed easily, still without motor sound, and stood with only a couple of small dents in its snout.

Three men got out of it, their faces unidentifiable in the dark, their bodies just black shapes. They yanked open the left door of The Avenger’s car. The right one would have needed a blowtorch and crowbar. One of the men drew a gun!

“No shots!” snapped another. “Club ’em. That’ll make it look like it was done in the accident.”

So they dragged out a slim but compact form. That was The Avenger, eyes closed, breathing heavily. Then they got a gangling, bony body out—and that was Mac.

With the two limp bodies in the open, on the road, where they could swing at them freely, they raised their guns to break bone and cartilage!

They had reason for being so sure that both men were as senseless as they seemed to be. Any others would have been, after that broadside smash. But they didn’t know that one of many devices in that special car of The Avenger was a clampdown arm that snapped across the thighs of all the passengers at the press of a button. This padded bar held bodies straight and firm against impending accident. And Benson had snapped it when the car from the lane leaped at them, and he had unsnapped it again when the accident was over.

But the gunmen didn’t know this. All they knew was that the hands of the fellow with the snow-white hair suddenly shot out, grabbed the legs of the fellow who was bending over him to club him and pulled.

The man choked out a curse and fell. He fell, by intent of the white-haired man, against the fellow who was going to club MacMurdie. And then both of them sprawled in a tangle that would have been funny in less deadly circumstances.

“Get the skurlies!” roared Mac, leaping up and boring toward the third man. This one had leveled his gun hastily. He pulled the trigger and to hell with the noise!

The slug got Mac in the abdomen, and the gunman half turned to help his pals, assuming, of course, that a slug in the stomach would stop any man. Permanently. But under Mac’s clothes was that celluglass protection that had saved the lives of all the band so many times. Mac kept right on coming.

His fist caught the fellow right under the ear; and he turned a pin wheel in thin air that was almost beautiful to behold. Mac whirled to help The Avenger; but, as he might have known ahead of time, there was no need for that.

The two men had risen from their sprawled heap and charged. Benson had clipped one on the jaw as neatly as if delivering an anaesthetic in a hospital before Mac turned. He got the second just as Mac waded in.

“Get to that car!” Benson snapped to Mac. “Quick! Before—”

But the time had already passed for that. Someone had remained in the mystery car, at the wheel. And now it leaped back like a frightened lobster, stopped on a dime, and leaped forward up the road. Mac had never seen such a pickup, and he stopped his instinctive but senseless chase on foot after about four steps.

“Too bad,” said Benson, when Mac came back. “I wanted to look at that machine, very much.” The pale, awesome eyes were coldly disappointed but the paralyzed face, of course, could show no emotion; it was glacier-rigid. “Anyway, we have these three men to question.”

“How about Smitty?” said Mac anxiously. “He must still be several miles from here. I’ll try to raise him.”

The Scot worked the little belt set, and to his infinite relief got a quick answer.

“Yeah, it’s me. Smitty,” came the tiny voice from the set. “You on your way here alone?”

“No, Muster Benson is with me.”

Smitty’s voice was sheepish.

“Hey, that’s too bad. It seems I squawked before it was necessary. I got loose without any trouble at all and got away from the hangar before anybody showed up. Then the gang came back, and they dusted around for me plenty. But didn’t find me; so there’s no need of you going any farther.”

“Are ye sure?” asked Mac anxiously. He kidded the life out of the big fellow when everything was all right. For one thing, he was one of the few men alive who could call Smitty by his true name, Algernon Heathcote Smith, and escape alive. But when trouble threatened, he sprang to the giant’s aid like a frightened mother.

“Sure I’m sure,” said Smitty. “I’m O.K., Mac. But I want to do a little looking around here. I’ll be back to headquarters before the night is over.”

“Fine,” said Mac. “We’ll be there, too. We’ve got a couple of unwillin’ guests that might be persuaded to answer a few questions.”

When Smitty had said he was O.K., he meant just that. He had walked openly around the field near the hangar and seen no one. He was serenely convinced that he was alone and all right.

So he clicked off his little set, put the tiny earphone into his pocket, turned—and gaped into the muzzle of a gun!

It was held by a man who had seemingly risen from the ground beside Smitty, so well had he been hidden in the tall grass. And at the sight of this man, Smitty’s blood ran cold.

He was surely a maniac! That was the giant’s immediate thought.

He was tall, old enough to have iron-gray hair that hung down like a wig, and straggly, iron-gray whiskers. He had a wild light in his eyes. He looked, altogether, like an elderly violin player, even more in need of a haircut than such characters are traditionally supposed to be.

And in his veined hand this wild-eyed maniac held a large revolver.

“You thief!” he squealed. “You dirty thief! You’re going to die, right now!”

And the revolver jerked straight in his hand with its muzzle almost in Smitty’s face! Lead and thin flame lanced from it!

Unfortunately, Mac and The Avenger had no way of knowing what had been done to the giant, less than two minutes after he had told Mac he was all right.

And they were too intent on working over their prisoners to speculate about it.

A truck had brought them to New York again after Benson had stopped the driver and exhibited a badge of the United States Secret Service—of which The Avenger was an honorary member—in front of the man’s startled eyes. The truck had delivered Mac and Benson and their prisoners clear to the Bleek Street entrance; and the driver would take nothing but thanks for it. He had heard of this man with the granite face and the pale, cold eyes.

Up in the vast top-floor room, The Avenger’s icy eyes drilled into the sullen faces of their three captives.

Benson had several chemical aids to the extraction of truth from unwilling guests; serums such as even the big city police departments didn’t even know existed. But he had one way that was superior to all the others, and that was a natural way. Natural to him, at least.

The Avenger’s deadly, glittering eyes had hypnotic power to an almost unprecedented degree; so as he searched the faces of these three thugs, he looked for the weakest will.

The possessor of that, as often happens, was the biggest man physically. He had a jaw like a snow plow, beetle brows drawn in a terrific scowl and a mouth that looked like a slash cut in stone.

But in his shifty eyes, Benson read paralyzing fear, and not very much will power.

His gaze remained on the shifty eyes. Mac, without any words being necessary, led the two other men out of the room. He locked them in a cell that Houdini, himself, could not have escaped from, then hurried back.

The fun was already commencing, short as the elapsed time had been. The man was so subjugated by the icily flaring eyes of The Avenger that he might as well have been Benson’s own hand.

“You meant to kill us tonight,” Benson said, voice pitched in a monotone that was as compelling as the drone of a buzz saw. “Why?”

“To keep you from talking to Doris Jackson.”

“Who is this Doris Jackson?” said Benson.

“I don’t know. We only know her name and what she looks like. We’re to get her, too.”

“Then you haven’t done anything to her, yet?”

“Not as far as I know,” said the man. His voice was like a phonograph recording, it was so mechanical and so without volition.

“Why are you to kill the girl?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“Do any of the others know?”

“I don’t think so. None of them that I ran around with had anything to say about it.”

“Where did you get that curious automobile you were riding in?”

“Detroit,” said the man, voice dull and docile. “We got it yesterday morning, about dawn, on the east shore of Lake Michigan, but it came from Detroit. We followed the closed van that took it across the State, all night.”

“What kind of car is it?”

“I don’t know. But it’s some buggy. It’ll go away over a hundred, and takes a plowed field like it was a smooth road. And you can’t hurt it.”

“You don’t know whom it originally belonged to?”

“No.”

“Or where it concerns Doris Jackson?”

“No.”

“Who is Robert Mantis?”

“Never heard of a guy by that name.”

Thus ended a period of an almost fruitless questioning. Dick Benson had gotten very little out of his carefully transported prisoners; just the one fact that Doris Jackson was concerned in some manner with a mystery car, the likes of which no one had ever seen before.

First thing next morning, Josh Newton and Mac stood before The Avenger’s big desk and stared into the icy, colorless eyes of their chief.

They could still be awed and disquieted by those eyes. They never quite got used to them.

“Take the small plane,” said Benson, voice quiet but vibrant with authority, “and go to Detroit. See if any manufacturer either there or in Flint has put out a mystery car lately. Some machine that has grown in a guarded laboratory and was recently sneaked out into the country for a secret test.”

“ ’Twill not be easy,” said Mac gloomily. The dour Scot was the world’s worst pessimist. “A manufacturer wouldn’t report even the theft of such a car; he’d be anxious to avoid publicity.”

“You can find out,” said Benson, voice so quietly confident that it made the two feel they could accomplish any miracle. Which is one of the qualities of leadership.

Josh and Mac turned and went to the door. Near it, was Rosabel, Josh’s pretty wife, who was as well-educated and as mentally sharp as her husband.

Josh kissed her, said: “So long,” and went out. But the way he did it told how close the two were. And Rosabel’s smile showed that she knew, as she always did when Josh left her, even on a seemingly safe assignment, that he might never come back alive.

The Avenger’s icy eyes rested on Rosabel.

“Take care of things here,” he said. “Above all, if this Doris Jackson calls, get her to come here if she feels she can do so safely. Find her exact location if she thinks she’d better not risk it. I’m going after Smitty. It’s odd he hasn’t showed up by now.”

He went to the basement and got into one of his cars, a coupé that looked old and sedate but which had a motor like a locomotive. He started again on the trip to Clagget’s airfield which had been interrupted last night.

Nearly nine hours had passed since the giant had said he was O. K., and there had been no sound from him. It was possible, of course, that some emergency had arisen calling for instant action on his part—trailing someone to some distant part, perhaps. But this was not probable because he would almost certainly have reported the fact. And there had been no radio or any other kind of message from him.